air.”
“So you can be the Boy Scout and do the right thing?”
“Is that so wrong?”
“It’s been almost two years.”
“I know.” I was an asshole to her when we broke up, mainly because she didn’t want to listen. It was after Melissa’s death and I realized I didn’t love Nina, not the way I’d previously thought I had, not the way a man should love a woman he was dating for years. I was done wasting time with things that didn’t matter, but I hadn’t treated her kindly or respectfully. Maybe if I explained, in private, we could move on.
I reached around her to open the door.
She smiled up at me, a soft, friendly smile I had at one time been so attracted to. “Fine, Hudson. If it will make you feel better.”
“So, on a scale of one to ten, how difficult are your dad and brother going to be about this meeting?”
“With you? Probably a nine.”
“Oh great. Because I was worried this dinner wasn’t going to be stressful at all.”
She burst into a laugh and we walked in as if what she overheard meant nothing, but she was happy to be with me anyway.
Yeah. She and I needed to talk.
“What are you going to give me for walking away?”
“Pardon?” I patted my mouth with my black cloth napkin.
I hadn’t expected her dad to ignore business all through dinner, or for her brother to continue glaring at me like he wanted to set me on fire.
And I definitely hadn’t expected this to be his opening line to get down to work.
“You heard me. If we choose to walk away—”
“Which we won’t—” Patrick cut in. Where Nina was aloof and proper and possibly unfeeling, Patrick was a douche, living on Daddy’s money and pretending he helped out at the office. He’d run the business into the ground when Gerald retired eventually.
Without me to merge the companies, Patrick would ruin his inheritance and everything Gerald and his father and his father before him built. At one point, they’d owned most of the farmland around Des Moines. And what they didn’t own, they bought. Once development started happening and once the suburbs started taking off, they became the richest family in Iowa. Far surpassing our own.
We stuck to Des Moines. They had land in every county of the state.
Gerald cut Patrick a glance and returned his attention to me. “You want the river land. We want it. What would you give up to get what you want?”
I tossed down my napkin and reached for my glass of wine. “I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say this Gerald, but I don’t think I’d have to give up anything.” I leaned forward, took pleasure as his features pinched in irritation, and rested my forearms on the table. “Our company is in a stronger position. Due to the last three deals Patrick here has tried to close, which were rife with nothing but trouble and delayed timelines and screw-ups in the proposals and changing construction plans halfway through.” I flipped my hand in the air. “Plus, there are the whispers I’ve heard of shoddy inspections passing through when they shouldn’t have and substandard materials being used.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” Patrick hissed.
“Don’t you have a fiancée to get to?” I sneered at him to shut him up.
The benefit of traveling in the same circles as men like him was that there was no lack of gossip when everything in their life when to hell. Like the fact his fiancée, Shannon Hale, caught him screwing a coworker in the bathroom at a bar. She took off for Raleigh where Beaux, her brother, was the quarterback of the Rough Riders. It was over a year or two ago but based on the way his face turned purple, my aim hit its mark.
“Fuck you.”
If we weren’t in a public restaurant, my fist would have smashed Patrick’s nose right then. The look on his face and the tone in his voice had everything in me coiled tight.
I ignored him as best I could and faced Gerald.
“Let’s leave the personal insults out of it,” Gerald growled. “But speaking of, I’m surprised your dad isn’t with us. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. How is he?”
My head was spinning from Gerald’s continued flip in topics but if he was trying to throw me off my game or what I wanted, he needs to rethink this strategy.
It spoke volumes of the loyalty our employees had with our company that we’d been